Paul Ehrlich

Paul Ehrlich (14 March 1854 – 20 August 1915) was a Nobel Prize-winning German physician and scientist who worked in the fields of hematology, immunology, and antimicrobial chemotherapy.

Ehrlich was born 14 March 1854 in Strehlen in the Prussian province of Lower Silesia in what is now south-west Poland.

He was the second child of Rosa (Weigert) and Ismar Ehrlich, the leader of the local Jewish community.

His father was an innkeeper and distiller of liqueurs and the royal lottery collector in Strehlen, a town of some 5,000 inhabitants.

His grandfather, Heymann Ehrlich, had been a fairly successful distiller and tavern manager.

Ehrlich was the uncle of Fritz Weigert and cousin of Karl Weigert.

After elementary school, Paul attended the time-honored secondary school Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium in Breslau, where he met Albert Neisser, who later became a professional colleague.

As a schoolboy (inspired by his cousin Karl Weigert who owned one of the first microtomes), he became fascinated by the process of staining microscopic tissue substances.

He retained that interest during his subsequent medical studies at the universities of Wroclaw, Strasbourg, Freiburg im Breisgau and Leipzig.

He married Hedwig Pinkus (1864–1948) in 1883 in the synagogue in Neustadt (now Prudnik, Poland).

The couple had two daughters, Stephanie and Marianne.

Hedwig was a sister of Max Pinkus, who was an owner of the textile factory in Neustadt (later known as ZPB "Frotex").

He settled in the villa of the Fränkel family on Wiesenerstrasse in Neustadt.

In the early 1870s, Ehrlich's cousin Karl Weigert was the first person to stain bacteria with dyes and to introduce aniline pigments for histological studies and bacterial diagnostics.

After obtaining his doctorate in 1882, he worked at the Charité in Berlin as an assistant medical director under Theodor Frerichs, the founder of experimental clinical medicine, focusing on histology, hematology and color chemistry (dyes).

After completing his clinical education and habilitation at the prominent Charité medical school and teaching hospital in Berlin in 1886, Ehrlich traveled to Egypt and other countries in 1888 and 1889, in part to cure a case of tuberculosis which he had contracted in the laboratory.

Upon his return he established a private medical practice and small laboratory in Berlin-Steglitz.

In 1891, Robert Koch invited Ehrlich to join the staff at his Berlin Institute of Infectious Diseases, where in 1896 a new branch, the Institute for Serum Research and Testing (Institut für Serumforschung und Serumprüfung), was established for Ehrlich's specialization.

Ehrlich was named its founding director.

In 1899 his institute moved to Frankfurt am Main and was renamed the Institute of Experimental Therapy (Institut für experimentelle Therapie).

One of his important collaborators there was Max Neisser.

In 1904, Ehrlich received a full position of honorary professor from the University of Göttingen.

In 1906 Ehrlich became the director of the Georg Speyer House in Frankfurt, a private research foundation affiliated with his institute.

In 1908, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to immunology.

He was the founder and first director of what is now known as the Paul Ehrlich Institute, a German research institution and medical regulatory body that is the nation's federal institute for vaccines and biomedicines.

A genus of Rickettsiales bacteria, Ehrlichia, is named after him.

Ehrlich has been called "father of immunology."

Among his foremost achievements were finding a cure for syphilis in 1909 and inventing the precursor technique to Gram staining bacteria.

The methods he developed for staining tissue made it possible to distinguish between different types of blood cells, which led to the ability to diagnose numerous blood diseases.

His laboratory discovered arsphenamine (Salvarsan), the first antibiotic and first effective medicinal treatment for syphilis, thereby initiating and also naming the concept of chemotherapy.

Ehrlich popularized the concept of a magic bullet.

He also made a decisive contribution to the development of an antiserum to combat diphtheria and conceived a method for standardizing therapeutic serums.

Here he discovered in 1909 the first drug to be targeted against a specific pathogen: Salvarsan, a treatment for syphilis, which was at that time one of the most lethal and infectious diseases in Europe.

In 1914, Ehrlich was awarded the Cameron Prize of the University of Edinburgh.

Among the foreign guest scientists working with Ehrlich at his institute were two Nobel Prize winners, Henry Hallett Dale and Paul Karrer.

In 1914, Ehrlich signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three which was a defense of Germany's World War I politics and militarism.

On 17 August 1915 Ehrlich suffered a heart attack and died on 20 August in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe.

Wilhelm II the German emperor, wrote in a telegram of condolence, "I, along with the entire civilized world, mourn the death of this meritorious researcher for his great service to medical science and suffering humanity; his life’s work ensures undying fame and the gratitude of both his contemporaries and posterity".

Paul Ehrlich was buried at the Old Jewish Cemetery, Frankfurt (Block 114 N).

The institute was renamed Paul Ehrlich Institute in Ehrlich's honour in 1947.